Word: leonardos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Leonardo da Vinci during his lifetime was renowned as the very embodiment of the Renaissance ideal, the "universal man," at once a brilliant painter, muralist, draftsman, engineer and architect. But he was almost as well known for his inability to see his projects through. "Alas," cried Pope Leo X, "Leonardo will never finish anything. He thinks of the end even before he has begun." As a result, while some 6,000 pages of his notes and casual sketches survive, there are only 15 known Leonardo paintings-and some experts place the number as low as nine...
Last week that one was in the U.S. Washington's National Gallery of Art announced that it had acquired Leonardo's 15⅛-in. by 14½-in. oil portrait of Ginevra dei Benci, a 15th century nobleman's wife. The seller was Prince Franz Josef II, head of tiny (61 sq. mi.) Liechtenstein, tucked snugly between Austria and Switzerland. Price: an estimated $5,000,000, more than twice the previous record of $2,300,000, paid in 1961 for Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer by Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. And while...
...Some 30 to 40 Rembrandts, Rubenses and other old masters have disappeared from the vaults of the royal castle at Vaduz only to reappear, with a minimum of publicity, on museum walls from Ottawa to London. Unquestionably the most valuable painting in the Prince's collection was the Leonardo Ginevra...
...Norton Simon, because Simon refused to buy unless he could take the painting outside the country for a thorough pre-purchase examination. Simon's skepticism was understandable. A strip at the bottom of the painting has been obviously repaired. And while the 16th century biographer Vasari mentions that Leonardo did such a painting, there is no record of what became of it or whether it is the same picture that became the property of Franz Josef's ancestors...
Maxwell Smart. Evidence that the lady is Ginevra is a scroll-like design, incorporating a juniper tree, that appears on the back of the painting, plus a juniper tree behind her head (ginevra means juniper in Italian dialect). Proof that it is by Leonardo lies in the handiwork itself. When the National Gallery began serious negotiations with the Prince, shortly after the deal with Simon had fallen through, Director John Walker sent Mario Modestini, a New York restorer, to examine the painting. "He went over it, literally, with a microscope for 2½ hours," reported the gallery's secretary...